Maxine Waters Character Analysis

Maxine Waters is a U.S. Congresswoman from California. Waters’s first appearance is in “The Unheard,” a scene that uses text from a speech Waters delivered at the First African Methodist Episcopal Church shortly after Daryl Gates resigned following the public’s outcry at the not guilty verdicts the jury delivered at Rodney King’s Simi Valley trial. In this speech, Waters affirmatively states that it was police brutality that caused the riots. She laments the government’s willingness to implement policy aimed at addressing decades of state-sanctioned, institutionalized racism, citing the lack of official response following the Kerner Commission report as a historical example of government inaction. Waters is adamant that race relations in America have remained largely unimproved since the civil rights movement in the 1960s. She accuses politicians of being ignorant of the plight of marginalized communities and choosing to believe that minorities who commit “petty crime[s]” out of desperation are hardened, violent criminals. She sees a double standard applied to the public’s condemnation of impoverished Black communities, suggesting that the government excuses bad behavior in its elected officials while condemning Black people for far lesser offenses. Waters ends her speech by justifying the violence of the riots, stating that “riot / is the voice of the unheard.”